I want a ‘Sketchbook’ style area of this forum so myself and other Unreal Engine Developers can post what we have been working on lately, a place where I can post miscellaneous experiments and ideas that I have been working on that may or may not ever become “completed”.
If I draw a really cool picture, then I can post it in the “sketchbook” area of conceptart.org, If I make a really cool 3d model or sculpt I can post it in the “digital sketchbook” area of polycount or blenderartists.org.
But where I post a really cool explosion I made with cascade? Or a really cool game mechanic?
A “sketchbook” thread is similar to a “work in progress” thread but it contains multiple works by a single individual trying to improve as a whole, holisticly, it is a body of work completed by the developer/artist/coder as opposed to the “work in progress” threads which usually only focus on one single piece of work.
I watched the website conceptart.org boom as a forum because of its sketchbook area, it was faster and easier to browse through the thread and easier to give people feedback than larger websites like deviantart.com.
I am 100% sure that if UE4 developers can start sketchbook style threads of their work, so that we can help each other improve and create cool things, UE4 developer skills will improve exponentially, UE4 is a long way from the game engines of the old days where a game engine was just a way to plug pieces of art together to make a game, it is as much creative tool with its own sort of creative discipline.
I know that epic will probably just ignore my request, but the epic has always been slack in providing decent community resources, back in the day, planetunreal picked up the slack so that people could post their own weapons/mods, well, that sort of thing just isn’t done so much by third-parties now. And I know that a lot of the professionals out there today really benefited from the old planetunreal community, that is totally different in its current form today.
Unity for example, (which I don’t even know how to use), is doing much better on the indie scene because of better support, even just little things like a user groups tab and their “evangelists”.
Nobody at epic really seems to have their finger on the pulse about these things, sure they make what I believe is the best game engine there is, but the company itself is like a giant introverted programmer nerd that neglects the world outside. They have neglected the tools, like this forum, that the community needs to be of high standard in order to grow and develop.
I’ve been on and off in the Unreal Community for years now and I can remember all the major names on the forums here and there isn’t really that many people, much of the unreal engine user base is completely disconnected from the central community here, because we have such a poor community hub. Many of the cool Unreal Engine 4 projects are “out there” somewhere in you-tube wonderland, there is a real lack of good centralization here, so we can just go to one place find and meet people and get critiques on our work.
I’ve been banging on and complaining about this for a while now and I will continue to do so. I’ve seen how great it can be when you have a strong community hub. Please epic, please put some effort into this.
Hey , thanks for the feedback. I think the Sketchbook idea is pretty cool idea for tracking individual’s progress . We are working on a number of changes to community related things (including some to the forums), so I’ll definitely keep this idea in mind as we look into some of these things.
. We are working on a number of changes to community related things (including some to the forums), so I’ll definitely keep this idea in mind as we look into some of these things.